


Car ma vie, car mes joies, aujourd’hui ça commence avec toi

by Farisya



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: And angsty, Don't Judge Me, I Will Go Down With This Ship, M/M, Subtle references to Kingsman, This is a first draft of a plot bunny that beat me over the head, Those suits don't make themselves, You can't tell me there's not massive amounts of UST between A&E, because why not, this is fluffy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-07
Updated: 2018-03-07
Packaged: 2019-03-28 06:44:21
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 20,069
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13898511
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Farisya/pseuds/Farisya
Summary: Arthur and Eames work together post-inception.Arthur and Eames are fluffy idiots.“This isn’t the best idea.”“That should be our motto, darling.”Also, Ariadne is my spirit animal. And quite possibly the personification of my internal monologue whilst watching Inception. Dom is kind of a dick.





	1. Mes chagrins, mes plaisirs, Je n'ai plus besoin d'eux

**Author's Note:**

> I KNOW! I KNOW! I KNOW!
> 
> I'm meant to have another nine, NINE, fucking chapters of my PacRim fic finished in the next fourteen days. I am very much aware. In my defense, this plot bunny was blocking out literally every attempt I made at writing anything else. AND! I've got five chapters in Beta-Hell. They're currently on their fourth revision and will be posted in the next few days. 
> 
> This particular story is a product of some unintentionally fluffy angst that popped in my head during a re-watch of Inception. I had this thought that Eames and Arthur should end up working together and that Dom should not be involved. That premise carried a plot bunny through a full adventure in Wonderland. 
> 
> So, here is a first draft of an Inception fic which I will probably never update or fix. Enjoy. I'm gonna go back and deep dive into the PacRim world now.

**March 2013**

Eames nearly sobbed in relief when the heavy oak door swung open. He didn’t even acknowledge the Glock 17 pointed at his head, pushing past the figure in the doorway. Arthur whimpered as Eames adjusted his grip to get him down the basement stairs. He vaguely registered the sound of the door shutting and the security system rearming. Then the tell-tale sound of the Glock’s safety clicking back into place. 

“Zed, what the bloody fuck are you doing?” 

Eames ignored the voice and slapped a hand onto the biometric palm scanner at the bottom of the stairs. As the steel door slid open, some of Arthur’s weight was taken off his shoulders. The wounded and listless point man was maneuvered gently onto a surgical table and Eames finally stepped back long enough to catch his breath. 

He watched as his last remaining contact from his past life, at least the last one he could trust, cut Arthur’s Zegna suit to shreds. She carefully peeled away the soaked pieces of jacket and shirt to find the hastily bandaged knife-wound tacky with fresh blood. Eames knew Arthur’s totem was sewn into the lining somewhere so he collected the pieces and threw them into the corner. 

“Do you happen to have the knife that did this, Zed?” She asked, not looking at him as she carefully inspected a wound that should have begun healing already. The two men had been on the run for thirty-six hours and the cut wasn’t deep. 

Eames reached into his waistband and plucked out the modified KA-BAR. As soon as Arthur went down, he’d found a way to use the assassin’s own knife on him in revenge. He kept it out of necessity and because he saw that Arthur was only getting worse from what should have been a serious, but survivable, laceration. He handed it over and she sniffed the blade then looked to the necrotic flesh on Arthur’s belly. 

“Your fucking lucky this thing is shonky, Zed. If it worked the way it’s s’posed to, he’d be dead instead of just nearly there.”

“What’s that mean, M?”

“It means that the blade has a twee little switch on the handle.” She flipped the heretofore invisible switch that Eames completely missed and liquid poured out of the hilt and down the blade. “I’m thinking it’s diluted venom. Definitely haemotoxic. With this level of necrosis, I’d say snake venom.”

“Bloody Americans,” Eames groused. Arthur moaned on the table and reached out trying to fend off M’s scalpel as she began cutting away the dead flesh. Eames stepped over and wrapped his point man’s forearms up above his head. Arthur screamed as the damaged skin on his injured abdomen stretched, but Eames held firm. 

“Indeed,” she wrinkled her nose. Pus erupted from Arthur’s wound. Soon the gash was flushed clean and re-bandaged, properly this time, and Arthur given a stiff dose of antibiotics, antivenin, and morphine. “Right, that should do it. He’ll be in and out of it for a few days. Should we put him under?”

Eames ripped his gaze away from Arthur’s pained, unconscious, face. M was gesturing at the PASIV Eames barely remembered carrying in with him. The silver briefcase seemed to taunt him now. Nearly fifteen years his life had been twisted up with the damn machine inside. Fifteen years…

“No. He hates to be under when he’s injured,” Eames finally said. M looked at him thoughtfully, waiting for an explanation. “He was Project Hypnos.”

M tensed up and looked at the slender young man lying on the table in her basement clinic. Eames followed her gaze. Arthur seemed simultaneously too young and too old for the DARPA project that kicked off dream sharing. Project Hypnos quickly jumped from the American Black Ops/CIA supported pet project of a biochemical engineer and her psychologist husband across the pond to become SAS’ own Project Morpheus. 

“He’s a bit young for that isn’t he?” She finally asked. 

“No,” Eames said. Arthur twitched in his sleep and Eames took the opportunity to smooth back the other man’s curls. “No. He was pulled straight out of Fort Campbell after he qualified with the Night Stalkers.”

M snorted. Eames’ lips twitched in a sad smile at her disdain. It wasn’t like SAS didn’t have their own ridiculous nicknames, nor was it that ironic for Arthur to have joined Project Hypnos from that particular unit. She studied them both for a long moment and realized Eames was hurt too. 

“Right, well, he’s gonna be out of it for a couple days at least. Get that shirt off, I want to see what you’re hiding from me.”

\------

Arthur opened his eyes, or tried to, as they were crusted over. His eyelashes stuck together and he huffed an annoyed sigh out. Trust Eames to leave him under too long. 

“Hold on there, darling. I’ll get you a damp flannel and a glass of water. Didn’t expect you to wake up this quickly.” 

The unfamiliar voice caught Arthur off guard and he barely concealed a full body twitch away from the sound of the woman puttering around. He managed to crack his eyes enough to realize he wasn’t in the London hotel where they’d been extracting from a Saudi prince. Instead he noticed the sterile walls and smell of a hospital room. 

A warm weight suddenly dropped onto his eyes and the salty film of dust and sweat was cleaned from his face and neck. When the cloth pulled away, Arthur opened his eyes completely to find a woman staring down at him. She had the soft olive toned skin of someone Mediterranean, but, as she chatted away at him, he recognized the heavy Yorkshire accent pulling at her consonants. 

She helped him sit up and drink a glass of water, talking all the while, and then set about checking his vitals and response times. He watched her, waiting for any sign that she was a projection or an extractor. He couldn’t remember arriving here and so he knew he had to be in a dream. His red die was nowhere to be found though, so he couldn’t check to be sure. But he _knew_ he was deep in Eames’ subconscious.

“And that’s when bloody Zed shows up on my doorstep with you on death’s door. I thought for sure you’d die in the night. The infection was a bit further than I let on, but he didn’t need to know that.” 

“Where am I?” Arthur finally rasped out. 

“Oh, shite. Sorry, darling. You’re still in London. I’m M. Zed, oh, you call him Eames, he brought you to me.”

“Where?” He managed next, but she thankfully interrupted him before he had to try continuing. 

“Oh, Eames is asleep. It’s three in the morning after all. We’ve been taking shifts to watch you. He’ll be down in about an hour if you can stay awake that long. The house is secure. We’re in Belgravia, quite a few rich paranoid bastards on this street, darling.” 

She smiled softly at him and hooked a fresh bag of saline up to his IV line. He waited for her to start asking him questions. But she seemed more intent on redressing the frankly horrendous looking wound on his stomach. She caught him tensing up as she cut away dead flesh and looked up to share a grimace with him. 

“I know, darling. But it’s the only way to stop the infection spreading. The antivenin ran its course, now we just have to keep the infection out of your deep tissues. This is much too close to everything important for my taste.”

He clenched his teeth against a scream as she flushed the wound, ripping a hole in the sheets on his gurney as his hands twisted. “I’m so sorry, darling. I couldn’t do this bit until you woke up. Needed to know if I was just hurting you when your guard was down or if you were actually getting worse.”

“Am I getting worse,” Arthur managed to grit out as she fished out a piece of subcutaneous dead tissue. 

“Well, you’re awake and responding to the antibiotics,” M responded, still focused on his gut. “And the fever has gone down considerably. You’ll have to stay here a couple weeks, minimum, before I declare you fighting fit.”

She suddenly dropped her tools and ran to a corner of the room. She fished out the remains of what was once an incredibly expensive, Zegna suit. She carried the pieces over and laid them next to his right hand. 

“Zed said you hide your totem in some clever little pocket when you go on the run. He didn’t know where it was, made me keep the pieces I cut off you.”

Arthur half listened to her as he fished around for the cuff of his right trouser leg. His tailor was a wizard who routinely devised hidden compartments in his suits for all sorts of dangerous things. The bespoke suits were only worn for the truly shitty jobs, when he needed to cover all his bases and a Kevlar-wool blend was actually quite nice. This job was not supposed to go sideways so he’d only been in the partially modified Zegna. He slid the red die out of his trousers and gave it a roll across the side table. 

“Huh,” he grunted. 

“What was that, darling?” M said from across the room. 

“Nothing,” He slurred in return, careful to catch her eyes. 

The door to the little clinic, now obviously illegal, but wildly well stocked and appointed, slid open. Eames strolled in wearing an actual suit. Not just any suit either, one of the two bespoke suits Arthur’s own tailor made for him after the first job they worked together post-inception. Arthur was unprepared for the completely haggard appearance of his partner despite the clean lines and perfect fit of the suit in comparison to Eames’ normal sartorial choices. 

Eames’ face broke out in a terribly relieved smile and he crossed the room at speed. Not even that one time Arthur broke him out of an Afghani prison in 2009, nor the time he forced his way into a two level dream to kick him because his architect turned out to be selling Eames’ out to Interpol, did his partner seem so happy. 

“You’re awake,” Eames gruffed out. His own voice nearly as rough as Arthur’s, despite his apparent health.

“I’m not that easy to kill.” His gravelly voice cut down on the sarcasm, as did the coughing fit. Eames leapt to his feet and refilled his water cup before practically running back over to him. 

M watched the whole scene blankly, smiling along with Eames only when he turned to look at her. 

\-----

Four days and seventeen hours after Arthur woke up, he found himself in a staring match with M. 

The infection was well on its way to reversal and she was no longer cutting necrotic tissue away. She’d even let him out of bed the day before and allowed him to take apart the knife that nearly killed him. He seemed surprised that M knew it was Fer-de-Lance venom in the hidden compartment. She had to tell him it wasn’t the first modified KA-BAR she’d seen, and that she’d kept her own pit vipers around to keep such knives filled. Those knives stayed stored around the house and her own snakes were part of an elaborate booby-trap system. She feared for anyone who legitimately tried to come after Arthur and Eames. 

Now, though, M and Arthur were not sharing glee over inventive weaponry. Instead Arthur was campaigning to leave the basement clinic and venture upstairs. Eames walked in to find them in détente. 

“What’s this then?”

“Arthur seems to think it’s perfectly acceptable to leave.” The woman bit out.

“I need out of this room, M.” Arthur went straight for the pleading, puppy eyes. It was so wildly out of character that both Eames and M twitched and frowned. A look that innocent should never cross a face like Arthur’s, not with the people he’d killed. 

“And I need you nearby medical supplies if you collapse from fever. Eames nearly collapsed carrying your arse in here once.”

Eames listened to them volley back and forth for a while, interjecting now and again to keep things interesting, but he wasn’t truly paying attention to their conversation. Instead he was enjoying them getting along in the first place, at least until it appeared Arthur won the argument.

“Fine,” M conceded. “You’ll need some clothes. I think I’ve still got some things of my brother’s that might fit you.”

Arthur smiled and looked to Eames, ready to gloat. His partner was looking at M as though she’d just shot him. 

“No.” 

M’s head whipped around and she frowned. The look softened immediately at the broken look on Eames’ face, but she held firm. “Zed, love…”

“No.”

Eames was up and moving, the heavy oak front door slamming, long before M could react properly. She sighed and told Arthur to stay still. When she returned a few minutes later it was with an old pair of sweats and a t-shirt that read “Oxford Brookes University” in fading letters across the back. She helped Arthur upstairs and into the kitchen where she deposited him into the breakfast nook that overlooked the back garden. M made him lunch, some soup and crackers as he still wasn’t quite up to using his stomach muscles to chew, and kept her eye on the front door. 

Arthur stayed silent, wondering about this new reaction from his partner. He could tell when Eames was working a con, usually able to parse out the bullshit from the genuine emotion. The utter despair that crossed his face at the thought of Arthur wearing some guy’s clothes was an anomaly, and completely sincere. Arthur rolled his die across the table out of habit and frowned.

“Eames isn’t his name, you know.” M broke the silence, startling him.

“I know that. Arthur isn’t mine. And you’re M, like in James Bond.”

“Exactly like that.” M responded sadly. “Eames and I met in SAS training. I was already a field medic, but I was bored. We both were. Grunt work was not for us. He came in with a call sign: Double-O.”

“Short for Double-O Seven?” Arthur asked as she trailed off. 

“Mmhm,” she agreed, nodding. “His first unit gave him that name because he was just as nuts as Bond and could pull any piece of arse he wanted. By the time we graduated and moved on to our first op, the training officers changed the names. I was M to his Double-O and he was just, Zero. Which, of course, was shortened to Zed.”

Arthur let this piece of Eames’ past slot into the bits he already knew from what remained of his military file. It didn’t quite fit, so he looked to her again. He knew M would give him the information he needed. The key to cracking Eames. 

“He tried pulling me our first week. Right up until he realized I was a better wing-woman. I was more interested in women than he was. The two of us slept our way through the entire female staff by the end of training. We ran each pull like an op, I set them up and he conned them into bed. Of course, the men were a bit harder, homophobia being what it is in the armed forces.” She shot Arthur a significant look at that. He glared back at her, hating that she read him so easily, just like Eames.

“Zed always complained that everyone thought he and I were fucking so he couldn’t pull any of the other gay or bi-curious men on base. I was subjected to several late night rants about my lack of penis. Six long-term ops and three years later we were forced on mandatory six month leave. I brought him home and introduced him to my brother.”

M fiddled with her glass of water and watched the rain trail down the windows. “Barty was just as bent as me, but far more discerning in his taste. Right up until he met Zed. I realized they were fucking three days in. I almost stepped in but, I’d never seen my brother fall so hard. Nor had I ever seen Zed express more than a passing interest in his bedpartners. It felt like winning the bloody lottery. My brother and my best friend were getting along.

“Then Project Morpheus came along and our unit was tapped for volunteers. Zed signed up, loved the idea of conning people inside their own heads. I went because he did. We’re still the only two of the surviving ten who aren’t bloody raving. Fifty soldiers volunteered. I don’t know how you survived Hypnos, but we took the Japanese lesson of hiring in architects to structure the dream much quicker. People stopped offing themselves after that.”

“They realized,” Arthur began. He didn’t like talking about those years as a young soldier, barely even into his twenties when DARPA came knocking and tapped him as a test subject. He still missed getting behind the controls of a helo. Talking about it with M, well it wasn’t his best plan, but he needed Eames to trust him and clearly this woman was his only way in. He cleared his throat. “They realized they needed point men first. Two hundred went through Hypnos and the early somnacin batches before Morpheus started. I know of ten, maybe twelve of them who survived. A few lost it in Limbo, but most are now working as extractors, legally or otherwise. We were the group they dumped newbies on, once they figured out we weren’t going crazy immediately. They brought in architects when they realized they needed to keep the projections docile. It’s how I met Mal, how she met Dom.”

“I always wondered how they earned that reputation so quickly. How long did it take for you to steal a PASIV?” She quizzed him gently, plying him with more soup.

“Mal and Dom had an extraction plan for me within the year. She saw more than the brass wanted and decided to keep me. She did that, just adopted people into her life. I guess that’s how Eames got to know her too. Anyway, I’d already managed to hoard enough somnacin that any chemist could replicate it. They took the PASIV and I took the drug. Hypnos was collapsing anyway, too many dead or crazy soldiers. We just managed to get the right people to look the other way when they shut it down. I petitioned for honorable discharge and set up with Dom and Mal two months later, not a single blotch on my record. What about you and Eames?”

“Zed had two of the PASIVs stolen within days of the first suicides. I took the somnacin and smuggled it to Barty. One of the other blokes was an engineer. Zed had him break down the PASIV after hours and we sent the notes to Barty. Then we took our first opportunity and got out when one of our COs offered early discharge. We started running jobs. He learned how to forge. I replicated the chemicals and ran point. Barty finished at Oxford with a degree in architecture. He and Zed got married and things were good.” 

Arthur barely managed to contain the surprise on his face. Eames in a long term relationship seemed a stretch. Knowing he’d been married…well. 

“It all went to shit in ’07.” She paused, noticing Arthur’s face. He managed a small grin at her, so she continued. “We were hired on to attempt inception on the wife of some CEO. Barty came down with us, but the guy’s wife was militarized. Her ex-husband insisted on it in their pre-nup. She knew too much. By the time we hit the third level we were all injured badly. The wife was losing it; her projections were getting wilder, more dangerous, looking for us. Barty got lost trying to keep the dream together and missed the kick. The woman threw a clot from the stress of the dream and died on the third level.”

“And your brother?” 

“Limbo,” she sighed. “We tried to pull him out once we secured our location. Went down over and over again to convince him none of it was real. Nothing worked. I forced Zed to stop when I realized he’d rather stay in the dream with Barty than wake up. I wasn’t losing both of them.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I was six years ago, Arthur.” She said, smiling sadly. 

“Still sucks.” He let her study the rain on the windowpanes again, munching on his crackers. A question popped in his head eventually and he couldn’t let it pass without an answer. “Your name.”

“Hmm?” M answered distractedly.

“You’re called M because it shortens your first name. Mal told me. You and Barty, you’re why he calls himself Eames now, aren’t you?”

“Of course. He’s just as much my brother as Barty was.” M replied, patting Arthur’s hand. 

Arthur let this all digest. Now he had an idea why Eames worked so hard after the Fischer job to pull him away from Dom. Why he wanted them to stick together. M got up and walked into the other room. When she returned, Arthur was still stuck on his partner’s past and she had a photo album. 

Before she could open it, the front door opened. Unable to see who it was from the kitchen, M pulled her Browning from its holster and a Walther from under her chair. She handed the smaller gun to Arthur and they both pointed their weapons at the kitchen doorway. Whoever came in knew how to disable M’s rather impressive security system, but that was no guarantee it was Eames. 

Arthur closed his eyes and sighed when Ariadne came through the door. He placed a hand on M’s elbow, pulling her gun arm down and shaking his head. 

“She’s a friend.”

“Yeah, a friend you should have fucking called a week ago.” The petite brunette snapped. 

“I did apologize, Ari.” Eames said behind her, leaning against the doorframe. 

“But first you let me think both of you were dead, or worse, for almost two weeks!”

Eames made to open his mouth, but was silenced by deadly looks from M and Arthur. M stood up, collecting Arthur’s empty soup bowl, and began heating up some more. Arthur needed more calories to heal properly and the clammy London winter outside obviously took its toll on her friend and his guest. The young woman took her movement as an opening and latched herself to Arthur’s side like a barnacle. 

Eames watched the girl and Arthur with a sad, but calculating look. Ariadne was certainly concerned for Arthur; it was written all over her face. What he didn’t see, surprisingly, was attraction. Intimacy lingered at the edges of both their gazes and in the soft touches they shared, but it was overwrought with simple affection. 

M began ladling soup into bowls and watched Eames. He knew he didn’t look like himself, more a forge of his normal smirking confidence. If she didn’t know him so well, hadn’t spent years in Limbo with him trying to pull her brother out, she’d think he was fine. She passed a bowl into his field of vision and he snapped his eyes to her. He languidly pulled his body away from the doorframe and stepped forward to accept two steaming bowls of chicken and noodle soup. 

“I’m sorry,” he whispered.

“It’s forgotten.” She smiled at him.

He gave a tight-lipped smile and a nod in return. 

\-----

Two days later M found Ariadne flipping through the photo album she’d left on the table in the breakfast nook. The beginning was full of international landmarks. Barty loved to take pictures of famous places to recreate in his own designs, both in the real world and in dreams. Arthur was glancing at the pictures but his focus was split between them and watching Eames in the back garden. M didn’t allow him to smoke inside the house. 

She flipped to a well-worn section near the end and Arthur tried not to breathe hard. Eames was practically glowing with happiness. Wearing a purple paisley tie, sapphire blue shirt, and slightly darker navy colored suit, he looked every inch the ridiculously dressed Eames of the present. The smile on his face was genuine and the love his eyes directed at the man on his right spoke volumes. M stood on his other side, wearing a purple dress and paisley ascot, a frilly purple and blue hat on her head. 

The other man in the photo, “Barty,” M supplied, was a couple inches taller than Eames. He had long, dark hair like his sister, who he and Eames both towered over. He and M shared the same olive skin and wide smiles. He was not as bulky as Eames, tending more towards a wiry strength Arthur could see just from the muscles defined under his own purple suit with navy paisley tie and lavender shirt. The man was looking straight at the camera and Arthur had to blink hard. 

“Zed has a type,” was all M offered him when he looked up. “Women he adores in all shapes, sizes, and colors. Blokes, though, they follow a pattern. Slim, dark hair, and tall.” 

Arthur glanced back down at the picture to avoid her smirk. “Why?”

“Why tell you any of this? Why show you this picture? Why treat your wounds and heal you?” M snapped a bit. “Why, indeed, Arthur. Why would I do that for a man who loved my brother enough to fight for years, decades, in limbo for him. Why spill the secrets he’s still too broken to share? Why, why, why?”

“Because,” a voice sounded from the kitchen door. Eames stood there, clutching a dripping umbrella and staring at M. “Because it’s not fair to either of us that you have to keep my secrets, M.”

The woman smiled sadly. Ariadne looked to Arthur, following his lead. Arthur shot a look to her and she pulled M into conversation. He hefted himself up, stiffly, from the dining room chairs and adjusted the dark grey Armani suit he’d found laid out on his bed that morning. He nearly made to Eames before his damaged abdominal muscles made themselves known. The forger leapt to Arthur’s rescue and, thankfully, listened to him when he demanded to return to his room. 

Once upstairs, Arthur pulled his waistcoat off and Eames sucked in a breath when he saw the blood soaked through to the shirt. He scrambled for the en suite and collected new dressings while Arthur gently pulled the shirt away. It stuck, tacky, to the bandages and Arthur winced. 

“You really must let me do that, darling.” Eames pleaded gently. 

“And you’ve got to,” Arthur paused and grit his teeth as Eames pulled the bandages off. “You’ve got to talk to me.”

“I talk to you all the time.” 

“Not about anything important. We’ve been here for weeks and it was M, _not you_ , that told me you’d been married.”

Eames busied himself re-bandaging the finally healing skin on Arthur’s stomach. The point man let him avoid the question until Eames’ fingers trailed lightly over his chest. 

“Edward,” Arthur breathed out softly. Eames head shot up and he stared at his partner. 

“You shouldn’t know that name.”

“And yet I do.” Arthur responded simply. “You’ve said it yourself I’m the best in the business. Are you really surprised?”

Eames looked away sharply. “No, I suppose not. Am I to infer you know everything now?”

“No. No. But M has been filling in the gaps. I only had your military record. You really need to get a hold of her.”

“M does as she pleases. I’ve never been able to control her.”

Arthur looked at him, willing him to understand. Eames shook his head and made to leave. 

“Get some rest, darling.”

\-----

Ariadne kept M occupied for the next few days, drawing her into conversation whenever the woman attempted to go to Arthur. The weather outside stayed wet and stormy, a reflection of the tension inside the house. Arthur had retreated to his third floor bedroom. Eames grudgingly accepted responsibility for his partner’s well-being as Ariadne distracted his best friend. He felt distinctly like Mohammad dutifully trudging towards a metaphorical mountain whenever he reached the bottom of the staircase. 

Five days of this and he’d learned quite a bit more than he expected about Arthur. The point man took his tea with copious amounts of milk and sugar, depending on the blend Eames supplied. He always, _always_ , dressed impeccably, except in the mornings when Eames routinely found him engaging in increasingly ill-advised exercise that strained his healing abdominals. The forger tried not to think about his new habit of waking early and delivering a breakfast tray to Arthur as he worked out in only his boxer briefs. 

Eames also learned that Arthur was much deadlier than even his imagination could supply. Given time and excessive boredom, Arthur began designing increasingly elaborate, supplemental booby traps for M’s home defense systems. Eames was positive he’d never look at a turkey baster in quite the same way again. 

The modified knife that nearly killed him was also a new pet project. Arthur fixed the faulty delivery system and set about filling replacement cartridges with chemical compounds that would make Yusuf blush in excitement. Household and medical chemicals disappeared at an alarming rate as Arthur tinkered with the KA-BAR. 

Arthur did all this without leaving his room, at least not that Eames was aware. He planned and fiddled and exercised for days. Eames helped him build his booby traps, collected chemicals, and hauled him into the bathtub to soak away sore muscles and change bandages. They spent most of these days in silence. Eames learned the most about Arthur when he wasn’t speaking. 

On the first day, when Arthur had asked for a cleaner with muriatic acid in it and a jug of distilled water, Eames learned that his partner was a fan of Glenn Miller. He hummed and swayed to Moonlight Serenade, never once spilling the acid. Once he finished constructing his chemical grenade, he pulled Eames to his feet and they danced, laughing, to Chattanooga Choo-Choo. 

Eames learned the next day that Arthur was very nearly as good at extraction as Cobb, certainly better than himself. He realized, an hour after finding Arthur doing pull-ups with his bloody fingertips on the closet doorframe, that he’d been chattering away about his and M’s various adventures. He stopped himself when he realized he was telling a story about Barty and Arthur was no longer doing pull-ups and providing commentary. Instead his partner was leaning against the open bathroom door, sipping a glass of water and still only wearing his bloody pants, watching Eames with a fond but sad look. Eames left the room immediately.

The third day, Ariadne appeared in Eames’ office shortly after lunch. She proceeded to beat him over the head with a stack of forged bearer bonds until he relented and promised to carry Arthur’s dinner up to him and retrieve the cache of weapons he’d somehow collected and cleaned in Eames’ absence. As they moved the guns and various other dangerous objects back to their hiding places around the house, Eames learned that Arthur was unnerved by M. Their early camaraderie lost to Arthur’s assessing gazes and M’s uncharacteristic silence. When he prodded, all Arthur would say was that M told him some things he needed to process. He always knew Arthur would be shit at lying when it mattered. 

Days four and five were much the same as the previous few, aside from Eames’ new habit of rising early to join Arthur for his workout. Five days was usually how much time it took Eames to construct a flawless forge, but he was quickly realizing that he’d never create a forge of Arthur that didn’t fall apart at the slightest tug. He knew, beyond a doubt, that if they were in a dream, he could fool any one of the half dozen people who knew Arthur well enough to call him for a no-questions-asked-favor. Even Cobb would have difficulty spotting the forge. 

It was Eames that had the problem. He pulled the IV out of his arm after his most recent descent and scrubbed his hands over his face. He couldn’t hold on to the forge because his mind kept supplying him with a projection of Arthur that was just a bit too realistic. The caustic, smug tone and carefully raised eyebrow always threw his concentration and he lost the forge immediately. A throat cleared from the door to his bedroom and he looked up to find the man in question watching him carefully.

“How often have you been doing that?”

“Darling,” Eames began and quickly stopped at the look on Arthur’s face. 

“You can’t do that, Eames.”

“Why the hell not? It’s not like any of us dream naturally anymore.”

“Because you’ve been ignoring me for weeks down here. Weeks. You’re already stuck on the third level. You can’t keep dropping further. You’ll end up in limbo.”

Eames stopped cold a few steps away from Arthur. Little snatches of memory began filtering in, moments where Arthur told him something wasn’t real. How Ariadne kept drifting in and out, distracting M. 

M. He’d never had control over his best friend, never. Yet, aside from her complete inability to lie to Arthur, she’d been conciliatory and quiet. Truthfully she didn’t seem keen on staying in his presence, preferring to keep her eyes on Arthur and Ariadne. 

Ariadne’s appearance was strange in itself. He’d never brought anyone to this house in the real world and yet there she was ready to knock on the door when he fled his uncomfortable memories. Eames tried to remember how he and Arthur got to the house and found he couldn’t. 

He tried to breathe and wheezed. His knees gave out and he collapsed back onto the bed. 

M appeared in the doorway as Arthur bent to check on him. 

“Arthur!” He managed to shout in between heavy breaths. 

The point man effortlessly flicked his wrist and a blade appeared in M’s throat. She collapsed with a gun in her hand. Eames sobbed. 

Ariadne ran into the room and threw the door shut. She quickly used all of her bodyweight to shove a dresser in front of the heavy oak door. Small explosions began sounding around the house. Suddenly Arthur’s activities of the past few days made sense. He’d been refitting Eames’ subconscious with his own traps, things his overly-militarized projections would know existed, but wouldn’t know how to fight. 

“Arthur, we’ve got five minutes.” Ariadne said as she deftly reloaded a Benelli M4 shotgun. 

“Understood,” he shuffled around on the floor, an arsenal appearing from underneath Eames’ bed. “Eames, are you alright? I need you to calm down.”

Eames took great gulping breaths and held Arthur’s eyes as the other man paused to place a hand on his knee. “I’m fine. We need a kick.”

“I’ve got one planned.”

“How?”

“I got hurt, it kicked me out of the third level. Ariadne is holding the second one together. You were down here by yourself for a week before I could come back after you.”

“A week? But you were here—”

“A projection. It wasn’t me. When I woke up and saw M, I didn’t know where you were. She threw me my suit and I rolled the die to make sure.”

Eames thought back to all the careless rolls of the die he’d seen in the last few weeks. Each time, Arthur seemed disappointed. The same die appeared in his vision now and he watched it roll across the floor. It landed on six. He dug into his pocket for his own totem. The poker chip was pristine. He was dreaming. Why hadn’t he checked before?

Dozens of footsteps echoed in the hall outside and Ariadne steadied herself. A hatchet blade dug into the wood and startled all three of them. When the first face appeared, Ariadne fired. A body hit the floor. She pumped the shotgun and fired again. Three more fell. 

Arthur shoved a rifle into Eames’ hands and stood up. “Ariadne, drop!” 

He tossed a grenade through the opening in the door and projections screamed. Ariadne stepped right back up and kept firing, Arthur joined her. If they died here, they’d drop into limbo and it would take ages to get back out. 

Eames glanced around his bedroom and took stock of the weapons Arthur laid out on his bed and floor. He hefted the HK G3 to his shoulder and took up position. Ariadne kept calling out the countdown. He was sure they’d make it right up until he heard Arthur scream. 

He turned to find M burying a knife to the hilt in Arthur’s back. He quickly dispatched her with a head shot and dropped to Arthur’s side. He was dead already. In limbo. 

Ariadne pulled the pins on a bandolier of chemical grenades and tossed them through the broken door. She fell to the floor and helped Eames roll Arthur over. 

“You’ve got to go after him.” She pulled his PASIV from the bed and began unspooling the IV lines. 

“What about you?”

“I’ll be fine, Eames. Go get him.” She took his rifle and began setting up a defibrillator. “The kick is in forty-five seconds.”

Eames pressed the button and let his eyes drift to Arthur. 

\-----

He found himself standing in Paris. No, not Paris. 

The street was certainly the Rue de Rivoli and that was definitely the Louvre. But, in the distance, he could clearly see the unmistakable skyline of Hong Kong. Behind him was Central Park. He started running. 

It took him ages to find the right building, Arthur certainly buried it deeply enough. 

The squat abandoned brick warehouse sat tucked between the disparate streets of St. Petersburg and Cairo. Eames stuttered to a halt as he nearly passed it and looked up. 

Arthur stood on the roof, smoking. 

Eames broke into the warehouse and followed the familiar rickety steps up. He pushed open the heavy steel door on its rusty hinges and stared for a moment. Arthur had surrounded himself with his memories. Not just any memories. Each of the dozen cityscapes surrounding them were places they’d worked jobs together. 

“Took you long enough,” Arthur’s voice rasped with age. 

“My apologies, darling. Won’t happen again.” Eames answered. He joined Arthur overlooking the cities of their past. 

The face that turned to look at him a moment later was lined with late middle age. “How much time do we have?”

“Maths wasn’t my best subject.”

“Eames.”

A building exploded miles away. Then another. And another. 

“You cut it really fucking close.”

“You hid yourself too well, darling.”

The door behind them opened and M stepped out. “Time to go, Zed.”

Arthur stared at him, incredulous. A gun appeared in his hand.

“Don’t,” Eames asked. “She’s my shade, sort of. Like Mal, but less homicidal.”

“She stabbed me.”

“You gave me a panic attack. She _is_ my subconscious Arthur. She reacted accordingly.”

Arthur kept the pistol pointed down as more buildings crumbled. He looked over at Eames, angrily. M smiled serenely and went back into the warehouse, closing the door firmly behind her. 

“We need a kick, darling.”

The point man nodded. He shot a significant look to the pavement below them. 

Eames sighed. “Of course we’re going to bloody jump.”

He only received a smile in return as storm clouds suddenly appeared. Lightning began flashing all around them. “Seems the most logical decision.”

They stepped to the edge and Eames grabbed for Arthur’s hand. Before he could say anything, Arthur yanked him close and hauled him in for a kiss. In the same moment he surged forward and knocked them both off the edge. 

\-----

Arthur came to and noticed the clammy air of New York City in early March. Then he registered the comfortable fabric of the armchair. He cracked his eyes and found Ariadne standing over him, frowning slightly. When she realized he was awake, she broke into a relieved smile. 

He sat up and ran a hand over his stomach. He’d spent weeks in the dream feeling a phantom injury. Movement caught his eye and Arthur looked to his left to see Eames breathing deliberately slow, his eyes still closed and nostrils flaring with each breath. 

“How long were you two down there?” Ariadne asked as she checked the pulse on their mark. 

The middle-aged man, a member of one of the cadet branches of the Saudi royal family, was still fast asleep. They’d upped the sedative with him as he was a habitual drug user. They didn’t expect his subconscious to be militarized personally by the CIA, but they finished the job. He’d been convinced by Eames, wearing the face of his first wife, to hide all his secrets in his vault in the Bank of England. Ariadne’s eidetic memory was invaluable to their extractions nowadays.

“It took me six months to find him.” Eames croaked out, eyes still closed. 

The petite architect turned calculating eyes on Arthur as he began packing up the PASIV and checking the prince’s pulse. “Arthur?”

“Years,” He said slowly. “I was down there for years. You guys got me out. I’m fine.” 

The unspoken assurance that he wasn’t like Mal made Ariadne turn back to scrubbing the room. Eames was not so easily deterred. The forger was circling the room, checking behind Ariadne for the slightest indication of their presence, but his whole focus remained on Arthur. 

A light tap at the door alerted them that the prince’s security was on their way back up from the distraction Yusuf provided when they missed the kick. Arthur collected the PASIV and shrugged on the jacket of his brown Zegna suit. It was strange feeling the fabric again after seeing it torn to shreds in the dream world. 

Eames shuffled Ariadne and the few physical reminders of their presence towards the door where the hotel concierge they’d bribed was waiting outside. Arthur followed them and deposited a wad of bills into the young woman’s hands as they turned separate directions. 

Before the elevator doors closed, Arthur saw Eames watching him from the door of the room they’d rented for the week to establish his cover. It took everything Arthur had not to step forward and head back down the hall to Eames. The look on his partner’s face said he was battling the same urge. But they couldn’t be seen together, not for a few days at least. The elevator doors slid shut and Arthur pulled out the burn phone he’d been using to communicate with the team. 

Yusuf had already checked in, providing his new number and congratulations on a job well done. Ariadne’s new number appeared as Arthur calmly walked out of the lobby. She’d sent him a passive aggressive message about getting the things he wanted. The Manhattan foot traffic swallowed him as he walked ten blocks up Fifth Avenue and then hailed a cab. Half an hour later he was dropped in front of the empty studio apartment they’d been using as a home base. 

Eames waited that long to send his own number. There was no message accompanying the text. Arthur jotted down the numbers, and threw his phone into the fifty-gallon barrel on the roof that was burning all the remaining paper and detritus they hadn’t cleaned out the night before. He pulled out another phone and sent out individual texts to his team. 

Yusuf received a terse message about triple checking the effectiveness of his sedatives on the individual members of his team. Ariadne got a selfie of his unimpressed face. He then spent ten minutes blocking her calls until she relented and sent a text of her own that invited him to join her in the security line at JFK. The tacit inclusion of at least a week spent in her Parisian apartment was understood by both of them. 

Arthur waited until he was indeed in line behind Ariadne at JFK for their red-eye flight to Paris to text Eames. He sent him an address and a meeting time and then shut the phone off as a bored TSA agent clucked at him for holding up the line. He smiled, letting the dimples show, and the woman frowned. He turned back to his luggage and gave her a quick once over in his periphery. When he turned back around she looked ready to pull him aside out of spite. 

“Sorry, ma’am. My daughter wants me to check in every five minutes.” 

Bingo. 

“Oh, honey, that’s fine.”

He managed two whole minutes of banal conversation about his fictional four-year-old as the woman shooed him through the line ahead of six annoyed Wall Street types. Five minutes later he was taking a seat five rows away from Ariadne at the gate. 

He resisted the urge to turn his phone back on.


	2. Avec mes souvenirs j'ai allumé le feu

**April 2013**

Three weeks after the job, during which time several minor headlines about their employer’s recent influx of capital from Saudi Arabia were published, Eames landed at Heathrow airport under one of his many false identities. He’d grown a beard since he left Manhattan for the chilly shores of Oslo and it still itched horribly. 

When his taxi pulled up in front of the house in Belgravia, he paused before paying the driver. It wasn’t often he explored his own subconscious in dreams and he was still feeling the effects. The cabbie grunted at him and he shoved a few extra twenty pound notes through the window as the London fog wrapped around him in the twilight. 

He picked up his bags and carried them up to the doorstep. His key slid silently into the lock and he quickly disengaged the electronic security and the more practical trip wire. His bags stayed in the foyer as he travelled around the house, double checking windows, doors, and booby traps. He finally made it to the kitchen and found that the Eames’ family butler, incidentally the man who devised most of the traps, had received his message and stocked the fridge in anticipation of his arrival. 

Eames grabbed a few things for a quick snack and then headed back into the foyer to collect his bags. Arthur was expecting him early the next morning. The address was not too far away, on Hillsleigh Road in Kensington. He opened his laptop and looked up the address on Google. The building definitely seemed like one Arthur would like. 

He did a quick check of his alarm and a then a trip to the bathroom before collapsing into bed. He shuffled through pictures on his phone. This wasn’t one of the many burn phones he used on jobs, it was his. The last three years, working with Arthur, were documented on this phone. Since the Fischer job, he’d completely reconstituted the inception team without Cobb. 

It wasn’t that he hated Cobb, though he certainly wasn’t very happy with him for underutilizing Arthur so egregiously for all those years. When he realized what Cobb had done to Mal, his own fucking wife, unintentional or not, he knew he needed to get Arthur and the others on his team. He needed to let Cobb retreat back into academia and love his children. Cobb didn’t need Arthur anymore. Nor did Arthur need Cobb. 

\-----

Arthur woke early to go for a run. Eames wasn’t due to meet him for three hours. He ran a six-mile loop, looking for surveillance the whole way. Satisfied no one knew he was in London, he hopped into his shower and washed away the damp chill from the fog. 

He made it halfway through his breakfast before the doorbell rang. Glancing at the security feed he pulled up on his television, confirmed it was Eames and he headed for the door. His partner let a smirk form when he saw what Arthur wore and the large _Dark Shadows_ mug in his hands. 

“I must say I’m surprised, darling.”

“Shut up, Eames. You can’t say a damned thing to me with that on your face.” Arthur snapped without heat, gesturing towards Eames’ beard. He stepped aside to let Eames pass by him. “There’s coffee and breakfast in the kitchen if you haven’t eaten.”

“Ta,” Eames said, smiling. He followed Arthur through the first floor, studying every bit of furniture and decoration as he did. The _Star Wars_ prints on the walls weren’t a surprise, Arthur was quite the fan of Luke Skywalker, and Eames was sure those prints were straight from some Lucasfilm vault. The three Klimt portraits he glimpsed were a bit of a surprise. Especially considering that Pallas Athene, hanging above Arthur’s workspace, was certainly not the forgery Eames created eight years ago. That particular piece hung proudly on the walls of the Historisches Museum in Vienna. This had to be the original. And oh, did that say something about Arthur.

He planted himself on one of the unexpectedly comfortable bar stools at the island in Arthur’s kitchen and kept looking around. The repurposed carriage house had been completely stripped and redone to someone’s exacting standards. The modern aesthetic was toned down with dark woods and slate grey walls. The only color came from the pop culture prints and priceless art hanging around the open first floor.

Eames nearly dropped his mug, a large comic book print of the Black Widow, when he caught a glimpse of Arthur’s fireplace in the center of the room. Hanging in pride of place were a collection of sketches. He left his bar stool and his plate of half-eaten bacon and croissant to look at them. Arthur followed him over, still sipping coffee from his own mug. 

“Where—” 

“You’re really quite careless with them.”

“I’m definitely not, Arthur. Those two came from the Fischer job, I’m sure of it. And I know I burned that sketchbook.”

Eames tore his eyes away from his own sketches to look at Arthur. The point man was still looking at them, a fond smile on his face and Eames frowned. 

“Why?” He finally asked. Studying Arthur in profile was making his fingers twitch. He suddenly knew, without a doubt, that his partner knew quite a bit more than he let on about Eames’ past. Their recent trip into each other’s subconscious aside, it seemed they’d been studying each other for quite some time. 

“Because I like them.”

Eames froze. The conviction in Arthur’s voice stopped him cold. Arthur took it as an invitation to continue. 

“Each one is a forgery. You aren’t sketching the person. You’re drawing yourself into that moment, in their skin. They’re all you.”

“I take back everything I’ve ever said about your lack of imagination, darling.”

Arthur smirked and made to leave the room. “Go finish your breakfast, Mr. Eames. We’ve got places to be.”

\-----

An hour later they were boarding the 8:06 train to Leeds at Kings Cross station. Eames settled into the private first class compartment and waited for Arthur to stow his briefcase. He knew for a fact that the case contained at least two guns. Not to mention the various ceramic knives both of them had stowed on their person. The forged MI-5 badges they’d flashed at security were some of Eames’ more convincing work. 

Expecting Arthur to take the seat across from him after the point man locked the carriage door, Eames spread out on his side of the compartment. Instead, Arthur nudged his legs aside and sat next to him. The train lurched to life before Eames could comment and he settled in to watch the scenery as Arthur read on his tablet. Eames awoke an hour later as Arthur returned his fake badge to his breast pocket. He glimpsed the conductor outside the closing compartment door and realized he’d fallen asleep against Arthur’s shoulder. Thankfully he hadn’t drooled. 

“Why Leeds?” He asked, sensing that Arthur’s whole attention was on him. 

“Because we’re going to see M and Barty.” Arthur responded simply.

“I know you’re the best in the business, darling, but there’s no way you know where they are. I don’t even know where they are.”

Arthur turned his head to look at Eames. He pursed his lips after a moment and hummed. “Trust me, Mr. Eames.”

Eames’ drew his eyebrows together. _Trust him_ , he thought. He wasn’t sure he trusted _anyone_ besides Arthur anymore. “Have it your way, darling.”

\-----

Another hour passed and they disembarked in Leeds. They enjoyed a delightful lunch in a small café a half mile from the station, visited a florist, then hailed a cab. Arthur gave the cabbie the address and slumped back into his seat. Eames was clutching the blue and purple tulips tightly. 

They spent the fifteen-minute drive in silence. 

Once they were deposited at the gates, Arthur paid the cabbie an extra fifty pounds to wait for them. He laid a hand on Eames’ left shoulder and pushed him gently through the gates. He’d memorized the route days ago, sitting in Ariadne’s spacious studio apartment in Paris. She’d spent the next few hours getting him drunk. 

Twelve rows in, six rows across, and there they were. A joint blue marble headstone. The left side was decorated in a geometric pattern of tessellated stars. Eames dropped to his knees as he read the inscription. 

_Bartholomew Percival Eames_  
_Born 12 July 1979_  
_Died 8 September 2007_  
_There Are No Rules of Architecture for a Castle in the Clouds—Gilbert K. Chesterton_

Arthur knelt next to him and rescued the flowers as Eames reached out to touch the words. The tears came when his partner reached out to touch the inscription on the right. Arthur laid a comforting hand on his back.

_Lieutenant Matilda Gwendolyn Eames, 22nd Regiment, Special Air Service_  
_Born 2 April 1977_  
_Died 8 September 2007_  
_The Dream is Ended, this is the Morning—C.S. Lewis_  
_Who Dares Wins_

M’s half of the headstone was decorated with the same tribal pattern as the tattoo on Eames’ chest. The two men sat in the grass over the two graves until Eames wiped away his tears. He took the tulips away from Arthur and arranged them carefully. Arthur stood up to give him room and then helped him to his feet. Eames pulled him into a hug. 

“Thank you.”

Arthur didn’t say anything. He wasn’t sure he needed to.


	3. Non, rien de rien, non, je ne regrette rien Ni le bien qu'on m'a fait, ni le mal

**September 2013**

Four months and three jobs passed them by. Soon it was high summer in Moscow and they were working with a new architect to design a maze inside the MIBC’s Evolution Tower. Ariadne had, “met someone and was taking a break to finish her dissertation.”

Their new architect was on thin ice. He kept ignoring Eames’ additions of tunnels and secret passages that would allow them to avoid projections indefinitely, should their mark’s militarization become a problem. The architect, Marcus, who’d come highly recommended, insisted that the additions would undercut the stability of his design. 

Eames thought Marcus was an idiot and told him so, often. 

After a week, Arthur kicked Marcus out and told him to go cool off. He made a few calls while Eames stormed about their rented office space inside the very tower they meant to replicate in the dream. Once he reached the person he wanted, Arthur shot Eames a significant look and wrote out a note. He tossed it at Eames’ face and left the room. 

The forger caught the paper and unfolded it. _Start packing up_ , the note read. _I want to be gone by the time he returns. The job is off._

He wasted no time collecting Arthur’s meticulously compiled notes, putting them through the industrial sized cross-cut shredder with gusto. Marcus’ paperboard designs followed. The remainders received a liberal spray of vinegar to break down any fingerprint oils. Bleach spray followed across every flat surface in the open office space. 

Arthur returned to the room just as Eames finished sweeping the pulpy mass of paper bits into a trash bag.

“Well done, Mr. Eames.”

“What have I said to you about that tone, darling?”

Eames got no response, except a smug smile. The two of them finished scrubbing the space in five minutes and cleared the lobby three minutes after that, carrying only Arthur’s laptop and Eames’ duffel bag. They spotted Marcus coming up the sidewalk and briskly turned the other direction, blending into the crowd of Russian oligarchs and their lackeys with ease in their crisp black suits. 

When they arrived in Hong Kong the next day, set to meet with their employer and provide an accounting for why they bugged out of the job unfinished, those suits were still present. Eames long ago decided that he loved Arthur’s tailor, a man his partner only called Merlin, because he’d never had a suit fit half as well nor actually be as functional. Arthur told him the material was silk interwoven with Kevlar and carbon fiber. They’d both taken to wearing one of Merlin’s bespoke creations on the job ever since they’d left London. 

Li Xiang, the twenty-something head of a burgeoning state-run tech company, waltzed into the conference room ten minutes after they arrived. He was followed by three older men and their replacement architect. Marcus looked much worse than he had the day before, bruising around his face and distinct restraint marks on his neck and wrists. 

“Is this man you told me of, Mr. Arthur?” Xiang asked, his Beijing accent out of place around the English syllables and Hong Kong skyline. Arthur nodded. “Good. I will take care of this. I am glad you find what you do. You are very smart man, Mr. Arthur. I pay you for job anyway and owe you favor.”

“Which I hope to never collect on, Mr. Li.” Arthur said, smiling. Eames was very nearly struck dumb by the dimples on his face and the repulsively convincing charm dripping from his partner’s whole being. But he shouldered through it with aplomb and quite a few jokes in Mandarin. 

Li Xiang’s people returned them to their hotel suite. Arthur pulled a phone out and contacted Yusuf. Eames heard snatches of the conversation as Arthur paced around the shared sitting room. He’d only managed to pull off his suit’s jacket before the need to collapse into a delectably soft mattress overcame him. The point man and chemist were making a list of the people who’d recommended Marcus and planning how to root out who’d paid them off. The dream sharing community, despite its significant military funding and wide use of civilians in the various projects, was still small. Arthur seemed ready to blackball every single reference Marcus ever used and Arthur’s word was as good as law to every other extractor in the business.

Finally, the conversation ended and Eames, dozing lightly on his cloud-like mattress, felt the bed dip near his head. He propped his chin up to watch Arthur settle his long legs in beside him. His jacket and waistcoat were gone and shirtsleeves rolled to the elbows in perfectly symmetrical cuffs. His braces were hanging off his hips. It was, quite possibly, the most rumpled and out of sorts Eames had ever seen Arthur. 

“Care to explain, darling?”

“Hmm?” Arthur’s eyes were closed and his arms crossed over his chest. He looked like a reclining, slightly debauched Dracula. 

“My little row with Marcus set you off enough that you just bloody handed him over to the Chinese government as a spy. What don’t I know?”

“Is there any chance that you’ll just remember that I’m the best point man in the business?”

“Not a chance.”

“I knew he was throwing the job. Any architect worth a shit would’ve jumped on your ideas. Marcus was acting like, oh fuck it all. You had a word for it?”

“I’m sure I called the tosser quite a few things in your vicinity. He was a right bell end that one.”

“Hah!” Arthur shouted happily. “That’s the one. Bell end. Anyway, I noticed the mark added extra security and changed his ‘random’ route to work again last week.”

Eames smiled sleepily at Arthur’s exhausted use of air quotes. “Then Marcus really started in on you and I knew something was wrong. He was picking fights on purpose then disappearing to make phone calls.”

“You tapped his line didn’t you, love?”

“I did. The first call I made was to Dom. He was monitoring the line for me while I started tracking down Indira and Smultz. They were the ones who recommended Marcus.” 

“What did Dom tell you?” Eames asked slowly. Knowing what the man did to them during the Fischer job, what he did to Mal, Eames hadn’t quite forgiven the extractor yet. Yusuf was a greedy sod who would never truly endanger them with his chemicals, he could be forgiven. That and he purchased three very personalized apology gifts. 

“Marcus was on the phone with Vasily before he hit the lobby.”

“He was a plant.”

“Mmhm.” 

They lapsed into silence, the exhaustion of their purposefully indirect route to Hong Kong catching up with them. Four airports in eighteen hours got them to their unusually grateful employers safely, but by no means comfortably. Moscow to Istanbul then Dubai, Mumbai, and finally Hong Kong was a grueling journey. 

The suite’s soft chiming doorbell woke them the next morning. Arthur found himself entwined with Eames, chin propped on his shoulder. His partner was watching him through sleep crusted eyelashes. Neither of them made any real attempt to move until the doorbell became more insistent. 

\-----

Eames hated Dom Cobb. Hated him and his obnoxiously beautiful and precocious children. Then Philippa, no, _Pippa_ insisted Arthur braid her hair and Eames sighed internally. He didn’t hate the children. They were half Mal’s after all, but they were disturbingly adorable. James was currently nestled at his feet, six years old and completely engrossed in playing with Eames’ forging materials. Arthur had nine-year-old Pippa’s hair divided up into six parts and was weaving them together in something called a fishtail that looked horrendously complicated. 

Cobb sat across from them both on the other sofa, alternating hard glares between his former point man, and Eames, and soft smiles at his kids. The doorbell that woke them up two days prior was the opening salvo of Cobb’s current attempt to break up Arthur and Eames’ partnership. Eames knew, deep down, that it wasn’t jealousy. Cobb couldn’t care less about Arthur’s long string of failed relationships, except to comment on a particularly bad choice in bed partner. Nor did he care that Arthur was still in the business. Dream sharing, being a point man, was where Arthur excelled and Cobb would never begrudge him that. The two men were like brothers. 

No, Cobb’s problem was Eames. And Eames’ problem was Cobb. The epic row they’d had shortly after the Fischer job, once Cobb was free and clear to resume his life, led to Arthur walking out of the Cobb household with Eames in a headlock. Eames couldn’t forgive Cobb for what he did, however unintentionally, to Mal. Cobb couldn’t apologize enough to anyone, least of all his children, for that mistake. 

Cobb couldn’t trust Eames, not with Arthur.

Unfortunately for both of them, Arthur was a better chess master than either of them. He seemed content to play them off each other, using the children’s excitement at seeing their Uncle Arthur as a buffer while he forced them to interact and settle their bullshit feud. 

“Mr. Eames?” Pippa’s soft, but strong voice, pulled Eames away from his staring match with Cobb. 

“Yes, Miss Pippa?” 

“Did you know my mummy?”

And, oh, the children were the worst. He flashed back to his first meeting with Mal, the deadly grace of her as she tore through projections in a collapsing dream. The softness of her voice that Pippa mimicked so beautifully as she teased Eames during his creation of “The Blonde.” The sight of her and M laughing together while Barty poured them more wine.

If he told the children enough stories that his own heart felt lighter and Cobb stopped glaring at him, well it was all for the better. If he and Cobb then abandoned Arthur with them at the Hong Kong Zoo and then disappeared to get pissed and yell at each other until years of built up frustrations, both personal and professional, were all aired, then that was better too. 

“I see how he looks at you, Eames. He’s always looked at you like that.” Cobb finally said, nursing an ice pack against his swollen nose and a two fingers of scotch neat. 

“Has he?” Eames asked, truly surprised. He hadn’t noticed until the Fischer job. His jaw was throbbing quite fiercely and he was sure to have a bruise tomorrow.

“Mmmm,” Cobb adjusted the ice on his nose to take a sip and frowned. “He’s the only reason I’m still alive to raise my children. He went along with every insane job and plan I threw at him while I was on the run, but he kept us ahead of the cops, Cobol, all of them. You told him he lacked imagination, and yeah, that’s probably true.” Cobb’s little speech was coming out nasally but didn’t lack any power because of it. He wasn’t even looking at Eames, instead studying the neon Hong Kong skyline coming to life as the sun set. “But,” he continued. “He reads people just as well, if not better, than you. He sees threats from a mile away and adjusts accordingly. We only ever got caught because of me.”

“Because you and those children are his blind spot.”

“You too.”

Eames snorted. “Since when?”

“Kunduz.”

“He said he broke me out because you needed me on the Kluwers job.”

“We’d already hired someone for the Kluwers job. He bugged out and left Mal and I hanging in Johannesburg for three weeks because Indira said you were in a Taliban prison near Tajikistan. No explanation, just a note saying he was going to find a better forger. He dropped everything and pulled every string he still had with his old unit to get you out. You were lucky they were holding you so close to the city. All Arthur had to do was convince his old CO that you were both working some black ops thing.”

“Bullshit.” 

Cobb levelled him with that annoying, narrow-eyed stare that made him go all squinty and serious. It was equal parts hilarious, absurd, and terrifying. It meant Cobb was judging you. 

The retired extractor was stopped from arguing with Eames some more by the arrival of his children, and Arthur. They poured into the room in a sea of balloons and large stuffed animals. It took three hours for the sugar to wear off and by that point all three grown men were exhausted. Eames slumped into his bed, James nestled on his left, and nearly forgot all about Cobb’s insinuations. The small boy Arthur loved so dearly, who reminded them both of his mother, snuggled into Eames’ side and the forger inhaled the scent of baby shampoo as he drifted off to sleep with Mal’s voice in his head.

He heard her again the next morning as he and Arthur packed the Cobbs off on their flight back to LA. Arthur stared wistfully at the children as they frantically waved goodbye. Once they both assured themselves that no one was following the Cobbs or them, they turned to head for their own gate. 

London was calling.


	4. Je reparts à zéro

**January 2014**

Eames finally plucked up the courage to ask about their trip to limbo the previous year. They were in Manhattan, again, surveilling their mark’s girlfriend as she waited tables. She was half-Lebanese, half-Norwegian and all stern smiles with her customers. Her eyes glittered in malicious glee each time someone flirted with her and she’d suddenly start bringing attention to the large engagement ring on her left hand. Eames couldn’t help but be reminded of his dead best friend.

“When M was talking to you, what did she tell you about, well, everything?”

“Not much. You were on a job, it went bad and Barty fell into limbo.”

“It didn’t just go bad. The whole thing imploded on the second level. The projections turned on us the instant we dropped in. Barty was stabbed and he dragged us all under. The mark completely panicked and ran off. We tried everything to kick him. He resisted everything. He’d constructed our whole lives in limbo. The house, London, everything. M finally decided to abandon him. She hunted down the mark and killed her, then came for me. 

“We woke up on the second level with a deranged woman and had to fend her off. She’d had a complete psychotic break. When we kicked each other, and her, again, we found her having a seizure. She threw a clot and died with four minutes left on the timer. Barty was completely under. It was our third job with Yusuf. He managed to extend the timer and dosed Barty with enough somnacin to keep him dreaming for hours. We stole a van and got him somewhere safe and then went under again. We kept going under for six days.” 

“Christ,” Arthur whispered under his breath as Eames studied his cup of tea. 

“I wasn’t willing to leave him. I loved him. M knew he was lost. She spent years in limbo convincing me to leave him behind. I finally listened and gave myself a kick. When I woke up she wasn’t with me. She’d told Yusuf to give them both an overdose. I watched the EEG Barty was hooked to flatline.

“I blanked out. Yusuf got me to Mombasa and made me go cold turkey until I was dreaming naturally again. M rewrote her will and left me everything, the whole estate. Barty did the same two years earlier when we got married. Their Aunt Matilda collected their bodies from the London morgue and skipped off without telling anyone where she planned to bury them. She made me stay away. Scotland Yard thought I was the one who killed them, so she tried to keep me out of the country. I didn’t come back until two years ago, after she died.”

Arthur stayed quiet after that. Eames appreciated it. There wasn’t much he could say to make things better at this point. He wasn’t running away though, if anything Eames’ story seemed more like confirmation for him. 

“Mal’s mother was named Matilda.”

“I know.”

“I did wonder how she knew you. Did you and M volunteer because Mal told you what a clusterfuck Hypnos was?”

“Not at all. M and I were asked to volunteer. We always assumed, after, that it was because of Mal’s success with your lot.”

“Success is a strong word.”

“She loved you, you know.”

“Who?”

“Mal,” Arthur said. “Always said you were like some tragic Byronic hero.”

Eames smiled grimly. “And who was meant to be my Austenian heroine ready with plucky charm and acerbic wit?”

Arthur’s lips twitched and he refrained from answering. Eames let him have his moment. “Why did you kiss me in limbo?”

“Seemed like the thing to do.”

“And is there a reason we’ve not spoken about it since?”

“No.”

_“Arthur,”_ Eames growled. 

“I’d been down there for twenty years, Eames. I had no fucking clue if you were real or not and I felt like kissing you.”

_“Arthur.”_

“That better not be pity I hear, Mr. Eames.”

“It certainly isn’t, darling. Or did you think I used those pet names _just_ to annoy you?”

Arthur pulled back across the table as Eames reached out for his hand. The mark’s girlfriend, Heba, stopped by and gamely ignored the tension between them. 

“You guys ready for the check?” She asked in a perfectly affected Brooklyn accent. Eames only caught the slightest hint of her normal North Carolinian drawl on the first word. The urge to say “Y’all” was unbearably strong in Southerners, he’d found. 

“Yes,” Arthur clipped out. The terseness of his tone belied by the grateful smile on his face. Eames sighed. 

An hour later, when they stumbled into their hotel room, Arthur headed straight for the bathroom. Eames was left to collapse on his bed, suit jacket tossed onto the chair in the corner. He ran his hands through his hair and grit his teeth before roughly pulling his tie loose and heading for the minibar. 

Arthur emerged, waist wrapped in a towel, just as he uncapped the disappointing little bottle of vodka. The point man watched dispassionately as Eames downed the small bottle in one go. When Eames made eye contact, dragging a hand across his mouth, Arthur clenched his jaw. 

Eames was hard pressed, later, to remember who moved first. What he did remember was that Arthur suddenly had no towel and Eames was stumbling back onto the bed, apparently having stood up at some point. His clothes disappeared quickly, until he was in his pants and Arthur was straddling him, face less than an inch away from his own. 

“Arthur,” Eames sighed. 

“This isn’t the best idea.” 

“That should be our motto, darling.” He shifted, sliding a hand down Arthur’s back until he could pull the other man flush against him. 

Arthur resisted, holding his upper body up with shaking arms as Eames ground their lower bodies together. His head dropped into the space between Eames’ neck and shoulder. They stayed that way, lazily grinding against each other for several long minutes. Bit by bit, Arthur relaxed into Eames. When his arms finally buckled, Eames flipped them over and sat back against Arthur’s thighs. He was still wearing his pants. 

He watched his partner intently, reading him more closely than any mark. Arthur was flushed all the way down to his chest and breathing, not hard, but deeply. Scars dotted his torso, reminders of every close call he had as a soldier and as a quasi-criminal mastermind. Eames caught himself running a finger over a long, ragged scar that ran from just under Arthur’s heart down to his hipbone. He’d seen it before, once, when Arthur had changed in front of him during one of their first jobs together. He’d never asked where it came from. 

“Box cutter,” Arthur supplied. Eames flicked his eyes up to find Arthur staring at him intently. “I was fifteen.”

Eames’ hand tightened over Arthur’s hip. The unspoken questions flew between them as Eames rolled off Arthur’s lap to lay next to him, stroking the scar with a frown on his face. 

“I grew up a bisexual Jewish kid in Chicago.” The forger cocked an eyebrow at Arthur’s inadequate explanation. “Fine. His name was Trent. He came at me after school, threatened me. Someone apparently saw us making out the week before and was spreading it around school. His dad was a deacon at the local parish church. I was the exact opposite of everything his parents wanted.”

“And he sliced you up because of this?” Eames snarled. 

“No. He cut me because I got pissed off and punched him.” Arthur smiled at Eames’ snorted, “of course you did.”

“He swung wide and got me. It wasn’t too deep, just bled a lot. He freaked out, but ran for help. Our neighborhood wasn’t the best so I lied and said someone followed me down the alley and attacked me.”

“Why lie for him?”

“Because he was a terrified kid, just like me. I made him pay for it, though. He spent the next two years writing all of my English papers.”

“Too busy for Shakespeare, love?” Eames interjected and Arthur swatted his arm. He responded by licking a stripe across a scar near Arthur’s clavicle. The point man shivered. “How many stitches did you need?”

“One hundred twenty-five.” 

“And how many times did you make this, Trevor, kneel for you?” He worked a leg over Arthur’s hip and rested his chin on Arthur’s sternum.

“Trent,” Arthur said on a sigh as Eames began nuzzling into a scattered pattern of scars where he’d been clipped by a shotgun round in Afghanistan. 

“Trent,” Eames agreed. He snaked a hand down to cup Arthur’s cock and give it a twist which earned him a moan. 

“He never…God, Eames.” Arthur moaned loudly as Eames bit down on his nipple. 

Eames forced Arthur into a series of incoherent noises after that, biting and licking his way down the point man’s chest, worshiping every scar and blemish. Arthur’s hands weren’t idle. They traced Eames’ own long history of violence and near misses. Soon enough Eames pulled away to look up at Arthur. He’d snaked his way down and off the bed and was now leaning over Arthur’s weeping cock. 

“He _never_ did this for you, love?”

Arthur breathed in deeply. “No, no he never did.”

“Hmm, his loss.” Eames said, smiling, before surging forward and sucking Arthur’s dick into his mouth. 

He made it as messy and lewd as possible, taking Arthur to the hilt on every other down stroke and using one hand to tease his balls and perineum. Saliva dripped slowly down his chin as he swallowed around the head several times, making Arthur curse and slump back on the bed, a hand over his eyes. 

When Eames looked up at him, after a particularly vicious thrust of Arthur’s hips, the other man was nearly crying and completely unable to speak. He realized that it had, quite possibly, been years since Arthur had someone else touch him. It certainly had been for Eames. He hadn’t looked twice at anyone else since Arthur started looking twice at him. They’d been partners for nearly four years now, and Eames had been celibate for three of those years. 

“Eames, I swear to god if you stop what you’re doing I will shoot you.” Arthur snapped. 

The forger swallowed convulsively around the dick in his mouth at Arthur’s tone. He took his free hand off Arthur’s hip to rub himself through the silk of his boxers. He’d never really had an authoritative kink before, but if Arthur got that bossy with him in bed, well…

He popped off, to Arthur’s disappointment and a glare, and rubbed his cheek along the slick length. He bit down hard on Arthur’s hipbone, sucking a bruise deep into the skin. He wanted Arthur to remember this. Two hands suddenly appeared in his vision. One yanked back on his hair and pushed Eames back towards the flushed dick now weeping continuously and the other grabbed Eames chin and forced him to open his mouth. Those hands then pushed him down, hard and held him still as Arthur fucked his mouth. 

Eames gagged and Arthur slowed down, but didn’t stop. He breathed through his nose and gripped Arthur’s hips. He slid a hand down between Arthur’s cheeks and pressed hard on his hole, slipping the tip of a finger inside. A shout was all the warning he received and then Arthur spilled down his throat. He didn’t even get a chance to swallow everything before Arthur was hauling him up and kissing him. One of those strong hands slipped into his pants and wrapped itself around Eames’ dick. 

Shouting and cursing, Eames slumped against his partner. The hand on his cock was squeezing hard enough to keep him from coming and after everything Arthur just did, he was desperate. He pulled away from Arthur’s mouth to sob into his shoulder, begging for release. 

“No,” Arthur commanded. He rolled them and then forced Eames onto his stomach. A loud smack landed on his ass when he attempted to rut against the duvet. “On your knees.” 

Eames complied instantly, drawing himself up on all fours and watching Arthur step away from the bed to retrieve lube and a condom from his bag on the other bed. The point man returned quickly and pressed a kiss to the cheek he hit. Surprisingly, Arthur was already half-hard again. He shoved Eames down onto the bed again and set about massaging and licking his way from ankle to shoulder. 

By the time Arthur was hard again, he had three fingers buried in Eames ass and the other hand wrapped tightly around the forger’s uncut cock as he whimpered beneath him. It wasn’t often he acted this way in bed with a new partner. Typically, his dominant tendencies didn’t show until he was comfortable with someone. He set aside what that meant about him and Eames for the moment to roll his partner over again. 

He unrolled a condom slowly down his length and slicked himself up until he was dripping. He liked things a bit messy. Eames started to open his mouth, so he clapped a hand down hard over his face, making sure to leave his airway open and sank into the hilt. 

Eames’ eyes widened at the intrusion and immediately sank to half-mast as Arthur started slowly thrusting in and out. Arthur pulled his hand away a moment later to plant it next to Eames’ head and drive in harder and faster. He wanted to hear the forger scream. Eames reached for his cock to stroke himself. Arthur responded by smacking them away and yanking his hips down the bed until Eames was forced to wrap his legs around his waist. Eames sat up, bracing himself with one arm and grabbed Arthur’s ass with the other. The point man wasn’t sure when, or how, Eames had slicked that hand up without him noticing, but two fingers were shoved ungraciously into him. Eames went straight for his prostate and leaned his head up to kiss Arthur as he drove hips and fingers in a counter-rhythm to Arthur’s strokes. 

It didn’t take long after that for Eames to come. The double sensation of penetrating, and being penetrated, had Arthur drilling into him hard. He’d zeroed in on his prostate on the third thrust and aimed for it once Eames’ fingers breached him. The older man had been holding on for so long at that point, there was no use trying not to come. 

Eames screamed loud enough that someone banged on the walls and Arthur followed him with a shout of his own. Their room phone started ringing a second later as Arthur leaned over Eames. They weren’t exactly kissing, more gasping into each other’s mouths as fingers and cocks were removed from asses. Eames reached blindly for the handset and gave a terse, “Sorry,” to the person on the other end before hanging up on them. 

\-----

Eames’ forge of Heba wasn’t coming together. He was distracted. His and Arthur’s little tryst in the hotel room, two weeks previous, had been followed by absolutely nothing. It was like the kiss in limbo all over again. They were still sleeping next to each other every night, and occasionally Eames was able to sneak a kiss from Arthur, or vice versa. But they’d not touched each other sexually since then. 

Frustration was the only word Eames could think of to describe his situation. The music cue sounded in the dream as he tried again to perfect Heba’s almond-shaped eyes. He sighed and imagined a Glock 17 to kick himself. There was no point waiting for the timer to run out at this point. He woke to find Ariadne leaning over him. 

“Fuck!” Eames shouted in surprise. “Ari, what the bloody hell are you doing here?”

The petite brunette simply smiled and walked away an, “Arthur called me,” thrown over her shoulder. 

Eames wrapped up the IV line into the PASIV and closed the machine. Arthur was nowhere to be found in the loft they’d moved into two days after their encounter in the hotel. Their employer wanted them to have a bit more distance from their incredibly paranoid target. 

“What did he call you for?”

“Your architect isn’t going to show up.”

“Who Dave?” Eames asked, confused. 

“Yeah him,” Ariadne was now sketching, looking at Arthur’s notes on a whiteboard and their corresponding pictures of possible places to recreate in the dream. “All Arthur said was that he was hooked up with that jackass Marcus guy from Russia.”

And now things made sense. Arthur had become increasingly insistent on his vetting process since the betrayal. Apparently he was damn tired of architects turning on him. First Nash and now Marcus. Several members of the dream share community were mysteriously missing these last few months in the face of Arthur’s rage. 

“Didn’t realize he was a problem, pet. Arthur doesn’t tell me these things.”

“Hmm,” Ariadne answered. Then she sucked in a breath and Eames looked up from Arthur’s meticulous dossiers on Heba and their mark. 

“What?”

“Did you get mauled by a fucking tiger, Eames?”

If he still had it in him to be embarrassed by anything, Eames might have blushed. As it was, he let a hand drift to the fading green and yellow love bite on his neck and a smug smile to cross his lips. 

“Well, you see—”

He didn’t get to finish his sentence. Arthur exited the large industrial elevator that served as their door and practically ran to Ariadne. He picked the small woman up and spun her around. Eames tried not to wither with jealousy, but didn’t succeed all that well. Ariadne caught his face as she hugged Arthur and shoved her friend gently away. 

“You were supposed to call me when you got in,” Arthur was already chattering away. 

Ariadne dutifully and attentively answered Arthur’s questions, but her focus was solely on Eames. The forger had pecked her on the forehead and said hello again before retreating into the loft’s kitchen to prepare dinner. The three of them had long ago decided Eames was the only one allowed to cook. Arthur tended to burn pasta and set grease fires with no grease. Ariadne wasn’t much better. On their first job post inception she’d managed to scald Arthur when he surprised her while she was draining pasta and listening to music. 

She finally sent Arthur along to do whatever it was he did, wizardry and mad computer hacker skills, she wasn’t sure. Eames was calmly slicing vegetables for some sort of soup. Ariadne took a sniff and realized it was the same soup he’d dreamed up when she and Arthur went in after him last year. M had plied her with it several times over the course of the weeks, in dream time, they’d spent convincing Eames he was asleep. 

“Penny for those thoughts, Mr. Eames?” She asked gently, leaning against the island. 

Eames jolted a bit, his spatial awareness completely shot as his mind whirled. “Ari, pet, you scared me.”

She watched him expectantly. Arthur once told her, after three bottles of wine, this particular expression reminded of his Jewish grandmother and her ability to wear down mountains with her eyes. Eames was not a mountain and the tensing of his massive shoulders, god did the man ever have glorious shoulders and she wasn’t even fucking straight, told her that she had seconds before he crumbled. 

“What is that look for?” He asked, wisely choosing to turn away from her and back to the soup. 

“Just wondering when it was that Arthur gave you that fucking huge hickey.” She stole a piece of mushroom and some cheese. Ah, there it was, she thought. His shoulders were now approximately level with his ears and he’d stopped what he was doing. “And don’t you dare tell me some bullshit story either, Eames. I know you both very well. And neither of you is as subtle as you think.”

He didn’t react except to return to his task of adding vegetables and cubed chicken to the pot. 

“Also,” she started just as he turned around to look at her again. “He’s impossible to shut up when he’s drunk. I know all of his dirty secrets and tricks.”

That was, possibly, the wrong thing to say. Eames suddenly looked thunderous and hurt, like she’d kicked his puppy. He didn’t speak for a long moment, and she took it as a sign of success that he’d not picked up the knife again. He kept opening his mouth and then shutting it. Eventually he turned to face the soup pot again. 

“You’re a manipulative cow sometimes, pet.”

“I’m very much aware of this.” She watched him pull a poker chip out of his pocket and begin twisting it around in his hand. 

“You sure you just want to stick to architecture. You’d give Dom and Arthur a run for their money as an extractor.”

_“Eames.”_ She pushed. 

“Two weeks ago.”

“Holy shit, that long? It must have been good.”

“Indeed it was.”

“I sense a ‘but’ coming”

“But he’s acted like nothing happened, again.”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” She snapped a bit. Arthur looked up from his work and she smiled at him and waved him off. He smiled back and lowered his head back over his laptop. She dropped her voice down to a whisper. “What do you mean, ‘again?’ You two had sex and I didn’t know about it? _Twice?”_

Eames leaned forward over the counter and dropped his voice as well. “No. He and I had sex two weeks ago.”

They both froze as Arthur drifted near them to grab a bottle of water out of the fridge. “What are you two talking about?”

“Nothing.” They both said. He raised an eyebrow in that infuriatingly judgmental way of his and then shrugged and walked away. 

“So how was it?” Ariadne whispered as Eames set about chopping vegetables again. He sighed and a sad smile twisted his face. She was suddenly gripped with the urge to throttle Arthur, who was her best friend, for putting this horribly sad, puppy face on Eames normally smirking façade. 

“I’m fairly sure I’m not going to have better sex again in my life.”

“Wow.”

“Hmm,” Eames hummed in agreement. 

“You two have been dancing around each other for years. What took so damn long?”

“That’s the ‘again’ bit you were asking about.” He plopped the lid down on the soup pot and poured them both a glass of wine. “He kissed me in limbo.”

“Shit. And nothing else happened while you were down there?”

“No. I thought something might happen after. He invited me to Hillsleigh.”

Ariadne sucked in a breath. Arthur waited a whole two years before letting her anywhere near his London home. It was where he kept most of the important things. All of his other properties were elaborately maintained decoys, London was special. His art collection alone…

“Goddammit. That’s why…I thought you’d had a fight about M or your dead husband and were being really careful with each other,” she paused. “Sorry that was insensitive.”

“You aren’t far off, actually.” He took a large drink of wine. “He took me to their graves. I didn’t know where they were. For six years all I had was the house and I could barely go there for more than a night before I had to leave the country again.”

“Oh, Arthur,” she sighed and snapped her gaze over to her idiot friend. 

“We’ve been good since then, really good. But nothing physical happened, until—”

“Until two weeks ago,” Ariadne finished. “Eames, can I ask you a question?”

“Of course, pet.”

“How long have you been in love with him?”

He froze, glass halfway to his lips. His eyes darted over to Arthur. “Um.”

“Eloquent as always, Eames.”

“I honestly haven’t really put that particular word to it.”

Ariadne smiled. Despite his use of the word ‘honest,’ she’d never actually seen him be completely honest with her before. 

“It’s okay, Eames. Most people just assume you two still hate each other. I’m not most people.”

“Nor is fucking Cobb.”

“Dom knows?” 

“Of course he does, couldn’t be nice enough to say anything though.” Eames griped, hand clenched around his glass as tightly as his jaw. “No wonder he punched me. I’m usually more self-aware than this.”

She reached out to pat his hand. “It’s alright. How did you know you were in love with Barty? If you don’t mind me asking?”

Eames smiled sadly again. “Barty was like a ray of sunshine. You remind me a lot of him actually. He looked every inch the philosophy student, ready with some stodgy, esoteric quote, and then he’d spout this utter filth, or brilliance at you. He took my breath away. I had him in my bed a day after meeting him and three days after that I realized I never wanted to let go of him.”

“And it’s different with Arthur or you would’ve noticed by now.”

“Of course it is, he’s _Arthur._ When I met him well, he was really the same, just so young in comparison to what he became after Mal died. We hated each other. He was so rigid, and the complete lack of imagination, it was bloody infuriating. I started the pet names to annoy him, mostly.”

“Pulling pigtails in the playground.”

“Something like that. M and Barty thought it was hilarious. Then they were gone and I was just, well you can guess. Mal and Cobb kept us separated most of the time if I was working jobs with them. We tended to throw punches rather than use our words. Then Mal died and he and Cobb went on the run. I didn’t see the two of them too much after that. The Fischer job was the first in more than a year.”

“Why insist that you and Arthur partner up then?”

“Inception.” He turned to stir the soup pot, adding noodles. “It’s how M and I tried to pull Barty out of limbo. It didn’t take. M convinced Yusuf to give them an overdose the second I woke up. She knew he wasn’t going to wake up and she wasn’t going to leave him behind. They were twins you know.”

“But she left you behind to deal with it all.”

“She did. It was her way of giving us a goodbye. She let Barty drag me in to the point where I could barely tell the dream from reality and let me love him for lifetimes, let me love them both. Then she sent me back without them. She left a note, sent me off to Mal.”

“And then Cobb got her killed by twisting her own idea against her.”

“He did.”

“And you aren’t sure Cobb won’t get curious again.”

“I’m sure he won’t. I’m not so sure Arthur won’t try it. If he does, I’ll be there.”

\-----

Arthur kept Ariadne and Eames in his periphery. They’d been talking for well over an hour now. The few times he’d interrupted them, they acted like they weren’t talking about anything serious, but Eames’ shoulders were hunched tension. Ariadne was also fully into her impersonation of his grandmother and her wily, soul-searching ways. 

There’d been laughter, some shouting, and a lot of sad faces thus far. He wasn’t sure what to do with this information. It was also the most he’d ever seen Ariadne and Eames interact before. He didn’t like it all that much. 

Eames called out to him for dinner and Arthur dutifully backed up and closed all his files before joining the other two in the kitchen. His stomach went into full Pavlovian mode at the smell. It was the same soup M made for him in Eames’ dream. 

He smiled fondly at his partner and then dug into the bowl, ignoring the swooping feeling he’d gotten from Eames’ surprised smile. After a second bowl he did the dishes and let Eames and Ariadne hook up to the PASIV to work on their respective designs for people and places. He returned to his work and watched over them carefully. 

Ariadne always looked so small and young in her sleep. All the snark and lines gone from her in the slackness of the dream. Eames on the other hand looked like a sculpted Greek god in repose. 

“Fuck,” he whispered to himself. It wouldn’t be a good idea to remember him naked right now. 

He’d been serious when he told Eames that sleeping together wasn’t a great idea. He stood by that decision, and much like his ill-timed kiss in limbo, was trying to forget it and move on. But he wasn’t an idiot. He knew that Eames was confused, and more than a little hurt, by the rejection. Especially since Arthur couldn’t seem to stop seeking physical contact with him. There was nothing Arthur wanted more than to smooth away the frowns he caught sometimes when Eames thought he wasn’t looking. 

The timer clicked down and off as he finally got himself under control. Ariadne hopped up immediately and grabbed for her sketchpad. Eames always came out of it a bit slower, sloughing off the last dregs of the forge and centering himself in reality again. He’d spent too much time in the dream world, for too long, to let reality overwhelm him. 

When he opened his eyes, Arthur forced himself to look away. Ariadne snorted and walked away from the two of them, muttering about stupid boys and finding a good coffee shop open at this hour. Eames smiled after her, one of his real smiles which were soft and made him look ten years younger. 

“You almost ready?” Arthur forced himself to ask. They were still on a job after all. 

“Oh,” Eames snapped his attention back, sheepish. “No, actually. She’s giving me a bit of trouble. Reminds me of M. I keep letting her slip in.”

“The shade is back?” The panic in Arthur’s voice was evident and Eames flinched. 

“She’s never gone away. She just hangs about the edges of my dreams, watching. It’s not like Mal, Arthur. I _made_ her on purpose. She’s my protection detail.”

“She stabbed me in the back.”

“I know. To be fair, you’d triggered a full-blown panic attack, darling. I wasn’t in my right mind and she was compensating.”

Arthur huffed. It was an old argument for them now. “I don’t like it. Will you get Heba done in time?”

“I hope so.”

“You don’t normally deal in vague language when it comes to forging, Eames. What’s going on?”

If it were anyone else, Arthur would be tempted to call the slight pink of Eames’ cheeks a blush. As it was him though, he reconsidered and landed at frustrated instead. Eames was watching him carefully. 

“I’ve been a bit distracted.”

Arthur didn’t need to ask what distracted him. He thought it over quickly and without any proper logic applied. “Anything I can help with?”

Eames darted his eyes around the open floor plan of the loft and back to Arthur. In the next second, he’d hauled Arthur into his lap and was kissing him. They writhed against each other, pulling at clothing until Eames backed away to look Arthur in the eye. 

“You can help by not fucking acting like this isn’t happening.”

“What?” Arthur asked, still drunk on Eames’ kisses. 

“You heard me, love. I am _not_ a bad idea or a mistake or whatever else it is you’ve convinced yourself this is in your big head.”

“Um,” was all Arthur managed before Eames was up out of the lounge chair and dragging Arthur across the loft to the elevator. He crowded him into a corner as they went down two floors to Eames’ decoy apartment where they’d be luring the mark in four days. 

Eames latched his teeth to Arthur’s throat and began nibbling and sucking an impressive bite into his skin. The elevator clunked to a stop and Arthur stood, dazed, in the corner as Eames slid the industrial doors up. Then a hand was on his and pulling him into the apartment. He barely registered Eames sliding the elevator gate closed and latching it, instead focusing on the very large bed against the far wall. 

He snapped back to attention when Eames crowded against his back and nuzzled into his neck. They stood like that for a few moments, Arthur’s head tilted to allow Eames more room. Some of Eames’ urgency had bled away and he seemed content to simply hold Arthur steady, arms wrapped around his stomach and chin hooked on his shoulder. Arthur had forgotten that he and Eames were the same height. The man was physically so much bigger than him and his personality, purposefully, took up about ten times more of a room than necessary most of the time. 

“You alright, love?” Eames whispered into Arthur’s neck. 

“Mhm.” 

“What do you want?”

That was a loaded question if ever there was one. “I, I don’t…”

“Arthur, stop thinking fifteen moves ahead. This isn’t chess or a war. Think of the next step.”

“You make that sound easy.”

“It isn’t.”

Arthur pulled out of Eames’ arms and put some distance between them. He practically ripped his suit jacket off and tossed it over a nearby chair. His tie went next and then his hands were in his hair, ruining the carefully slicked back styling. Eames watched him calmly, still standing where Arthur left him. The point man stalked over to the windows, catching the insanity that were his curls in his reflection. Eames’ phone rang. 

“Yes?” His voice sounded wrecked to Arthur’s ears. He imagined his own voice would sound much the same if he tried to talk. 

“He’s with me.” Must be Ariadne. Or Dom. 

“No, he can’t talk.” Still a toss-up, Arthur thought. The people six floors below them milled about, keeping his attention split. 

“Yes, pet,” Eames cooed. Ariadne then. Dom and Eames still didn’t like each other all that much. “I’ll make sure of that, don’t you worry. He’s in good hands.”

“Ariadne, my dear, you are positively filthy. I’m going to hang up on you now and you are going to construct a brilliant maze and then get some sleep.”

Arthur turned at the sound of Eames’ phone thumping down on the stainless steel counter. He leaned against the floor-length windows, letting the cold ground him. Eames was similarly posed against the counter ten feet away. They watched each other carefully, until Arthur broke. 

“This is a bad idea.”

“You had this bad idea years ago from what I understand, darling.”

“Fucking Dom,” Arthur muttered. “Or was it Ariadne?”

“Both. They seem to think we’ve been acting like complete idiots.” Arthur started to speak, but Eames crossed the room before he could even open his mouth properly and pressed him against the cold glass. “What do you want, Arthur? Because I want you in any way you’ll have me.”

“You’ve always been just out of my reach, you know.” He whispered. “You hardly ever looked twice at me. And when you did, it was to fuck with me or whatever. Anytime I tried to let your attitude go, you found a reason to pick at me. It made me hate you.”

Eames reached up to wrap a hand around his jaw and kiss him slowly. “I’ve never claimed to be anything,” he started to say between kisses. “Other than a rat bastard most of the time. You are maddeningly attractive Arthur, and it’s a bit daunting if I’m honest.”

“See that, there,” Arthur gasped. “You throw that word around sometimes. Honest. And you rarely ever are. You realize it took six years for me to find out anything about you other than the breadcrumbs you left behind? Your fucking subconscious had to tell me you were married.”

“Yes, well,” Eames pulled away to look Arthur in the eye. “You haven’t exactly volunteered too much information yourself there, love.”

“Ah, but here’s the difference,” Arthur pushed him away and stepped forward with a finger poking Eames’ chest. “You didn’t need to dig into my history. You had Mal and I know she told you fucking _everything_ about me. And she did it because you asked her. I didn’t have that access to you. You never let me have it. Christ, Eames you kept me from losing my shit at Mal’s funeral, helped me take care of Pippa and James because Dom was such a fucking wreck and you _never_ let me in.”

Eames surged back against him and shoved him, hard, back against the windows. The square glass panes rattled slightly in their frames from the impact. “I am not apologizing for anything in our past, Arthur. Neither of us is a paragon of trust and virtue here. Yes, I was married. I loved Barty desperately and then he died. I spent the next three years screwing every willing body that climbed into my bed and perfecting my forging techniques until I was the best. Not exactly healthy coping mechanisms. And then Mal…” He choked up. 

“Beautiful, glorious Mal went too deep. She did the one thing she promised never to do after we lost M and Barty. She forgot what was real and Dom killed her trying to save her. You never looked back when he asked you to help him. Never stopped to wonder why Mal jumped. You just followed Dom like a puppy. Every time I saw you before the Fischer job, you were a little…less.” 

He gripped Arthur’s shirt and pulled him flush against his body. Both of them were still fucking hard and Arthur barely managed to contain his moan at the contact. 

“Eames,” Arthur gasped. “What the fuck do you want from me?”

“I told you. I want you to take me any way you want. I’ve wanted you for far too long to let you keep avoiding this. I’m not asking you to forget our shitty pasts, darling. I’m begging you to leave all that be and think about just _us_. Think about what we are to each other, because if you haven’t noticed, darling, we’ve been in a relationship for years now.”

“What? No, you’ve had,” Arthur stuttered out. 

“I’ve had no one since inception. And neither have you.”

Arthur shut his eyes and frowned, trying to regain his control in the face of Eames’ onslaught. He focused on Eames’ words and did what his partner asked. He thought about _them._

He didn’t take all that long to think. His worst ideas usually ended up working out alright, sort of, not really. But he wasn’t going to keep telling himself no. Not when Eames was right here, begging him to stop thinking and do something. 

Arthur did something. 

Eames found himself backing up through the loft as Arthur stripped him. His shirt and vest went first, exposing his chest to the cool air of the loft. Then his belt hit the floor and his trousers followed, making him stumble. Arthur compensated by pulling him forward and kissing him until his feet disentangled and they were moving again. Eames finally got his own hands moving to divest Arthur of his clothes when his pants dropped and he kneeled to take his socks off. 

Arthur’s belt was the first to go. Then his shirt and vest and trousers all in a flurry of movement from both of them. His pants, tented and wet across the front, followed quickly. Eames bent to suck him down, but found himself flipped over instead. 

“Lube.” Arthur grunted out as he latched his teeth onto Eames’ nipple. 

Eames gestured wildly towards the nightstand. Arthur fished around for it, blindly, until he found the tube and uncapped it one-handed. Eames waited for the inevitable breaching of his body and was surprised when it never came. He looked down to find that Arthur had plunged two finger into his own ass and was pumping them furiously in and out. A third followed, much too soon in Eames’ opinion, but he sure as hell wasn’t going to stop him. A condom packet landed on his chest and Eames looked at it. 

“Darling, oh god, Arthur,” He started as Arthur leaned over him for a kiss. “I’m clean, you know I am.”

Arthur stopped and looked him in the eye. “Alright then,” he said simply and then sank down onto Eames’ cock in one go. They stayed still for a moment, both adjusting to the sensation. Then Eames moved, just slightly to give Arthur more room for his knees and both of them moaned. 

What followed was what Eames would forever remember as the most furious fucking of his life. He drove into Arthur without mercy and Arthur responded by doing everything he possibly could to encourage him. They twisted and rolled around the bed, wrestling and fighting more than having sex. Hair was pulled, arms and backs were scratched, every available inch of skin was bitten. It was heaven. 

Finally, though, Arthur gained the upper hand. Eames was never sure how exactly, and pinned Eames to the bed. They’d slipped apart but Arthur plunged himself back down, taking Eames into the hilt with a near-silent gasp. He kept Eames’ hands pressed to the mattress and ground down deliberately. The slower pace was no less intense and Eames managed to break his hands free to dig into Arthur’s riotous curls for a kiss. 

They succumbed to sensation eventually and rutted against each other with blind abandon. Eames came first, pulling away from Arthur’s mouth to shout and sob. Arthur stayed silent until the last few thrusts hit his prostate just right and then he too sobbed and dropped his head down to Eames’ shoulder. 

\-----

Ariadne woke up, half-buried in the couch, to the sound of the elevator doors opening. Eames was sneaking in, obviously hoping she was asleep, wearing only a pair of low-slung pajama bottoms. She snorted, startling him, when she realized they were covered in dancing sheep. 

“Christ, pet, you scared me.” 

She just giggled for a minute, pointing at his pajamas. Then she noticed the scratches and bites all over his upper body and stopped giggling to smile evilly. “I take it you and Arthur are working things out then?”

Eames glanced down to his chest where there were a trio of deep purple bites covering his pecs. He hadn’t noticed them yet. The lights were off downstairs. He ran a hand over them and the other bites and scratches. Eames looked up to find Ariadne smirking at him. 

“Don’t act like this is because of you, pet.”

“Oh but it is. I helped you with your whole ‘self-exploration’ bit earlier and you pushed him. Pushed him right into your bed.”

“I didn’t need help with that part, Ariadne.” 

“Didn’t you?”

Eames ignored her, setting the kettle to boil and rummaging in the cabinets for the herbal tea he bought yesterday. Ariadne pulled herself off the couch. A good stretch made her whole spine crack satisfyingly. She padded over to the kitchen and plopped herself onto a stool, gracelessly. Eames failed to contain a snort at the sight. 

“Let’s make something clear, Mr. Eames,” Ariadne said. She pointed a finger at him, which somehow came off more menacing than it should have. “You two have been dancing around each other for longer than I’ve known either of you. I am Arthur’s best friend. I’ve endured one too many drunken nights listening to him wax philosophical about your ass and your tattoos and whatever else he finds attractive about you.” 

“What are you getting at, pet?” 

“Who do you think keeps pushing him to break his stupid rules? Who do you think convinced him that you were serious after inception? Did you forget that he didn’t agree to work with you until after I did? Who do you think has spent the last two and a half years telling him over and over that you’re in love with him, that _you want him?”_

The teapot whistled and Eames whipped a hand out to pull it off the stove. He poured the tea into two mugs and slid one over to Ariadne. She looked exhausted already from this job. 

“You’ve said none of this to me before, Ariadne. Why now?”

“Because he finally pulled his head out of his ass and listened to me!” She smashed her mug down on the counter, sloshing tea. “He stopped acting like a lovesick teenager and actually did something for a change.”

Eames sipped his tea and watched Ariadne angrily mop up her spill with paper towels. He digested her words carefully and thought back to every instance he caught Arthur looking at him differently. Every moment he knew the other man wanted him just as bad. 

“Thank you, Ariadne,” he finally whispered. 

She shot her head up and smiled blindingly at him. They sipped their tea in comfortable silence until Ariadne’s head began drooping dangerously. Eames cleaned up the mugs and checked to see if she was actually asleep. She lolled her head over and her body followed, slumping into his arms. He carried her across to the cot in the corner of the room. She rolled over immediately and he fought her burrowing legs to get the blankets up and over her. 

“Goodnight, pet,” he whispered into her hair, pressing a kiss along with his words. 

\-----

The next day, Arthur woke up with a jolt. Confused, he looked around and took a moment to register his unfamiliar surroundings. A large arm swung wide around his chest and pulled him back down to the mattress. 

“Go back to sleep, love.” 

Arthur rolled under the press of Eames’ arm to face his partner. The man in question wore a rather smug smile, even half-asleep and pulled Arthur close, until they were twisted up with each other and the blankets. He blinked his eyes open and Arthur resisted the urge to let a sappy grin cross his face. Eames smiled brightly, like he saw the expression anyway. 

“What time is it?”

“Ten-thirty,” Arthur responded, glancing over Eames’ shoulder to the wall clock. 

“Hmm. Heba has a hair appointment at two.”

“I’m aware.”

“Means we can stay in bed a while longer.” Eames shifted until he’d dragged Arthur underneath him and was holding himself up on his elbows to look down at the point man. Arthur dodged a morning breath kiss and then gasped when Eames ground down against him in retaliation. 

“You are such a bastard.”

“Mmhm,” Eames answered. He was now more concerned with sucking _another_ love bite into Arthur’s neck to match the ones from the night before. 

Arthur gave up trying to fight him after that, letting Eames dictate the slow grind of their hips until they were both gasping for it. Speed became necessary then and Eames snaked a hand between them to grip them both, stroking hard and fast. Arthur did the same and took control of Eames’ cock to slide a finger between his cock and foreskin, twisting hard over the tip on every down stroke. Eames’ rhythm on Arthur’s cock faltered at the sensation and he dropped down onto Arthur completely. They lay there, chest to chest, with Eames propped up on his knees, panting into each other’s necks until Eames cried out and came. Arthur followed immediately. 

Several long minutes later, Eames managed to push Arthur into the shower while he set about brushing his teeth. The bathroom was barely big enough for Ariadne to move comfortably, let alone two grown men of their size, so they refrained from any acrobatics. 

When they emerged from the elevator half an hour later, both of them wearing fresh clothes, and in Eames’ case an incredibly stupid smile, Ariadne was poking half-heartedly at the coffee maker. Arthur went to relieve her from her misery and Eames set about memorizing Heba’s schedule for the next few days. He watched Arthur fondly, catching similar looks from his partner throughout the day. Arthur focused completely on the job and only allowed himself to let Eames distract him once or twice, or a half-dozen times, as he built a foolproof plan to get their mark into the loft downstairs. 

Four days later they were packing up and heading back to London, on separate flights with separate travel plans. Ariadne had kissed them both on the cheek, hugged them, and then made them promise to give this new thing a chance. Eames found himself clutching his phone tightly and wondering if he should text Arthur, if it would seem too much like a lovesick teenager. 

His phone buzzed.  


_I feel like an idiot—A_

Sent 12:31 PM

  
_Why, darling?—E_  
Sent 12:31 PM  


_We’re literally going to see each other in two days—A_

_And I miss you—A_

_Is this a thing that happens in real relationships? I’m not sure I like it—A_

Sent 12:35 PM

  
_Haven’t the foggiest—E_  
Sent 12:36 PM

_Makes me feel like an idiot too—E_  
Sent 12:37 PM  


_Is it weird that I’m much more comfortable doing this—A_

_Thru text than in person?—A_

Sent 12:40 PM

  
_For you, darling? Or normal people?—E_  
Sent 12:40 PM  


_I am perfectly normal—A_

Sent 12:40 PM

  
_Don’t lie to yourself—E_  
Sent 12:41 PM  


_This is real isn’t it?—A_

_I’m not going to wake up on a plane later with a needle stuck in my arm?—A_

Sent 1:04 PM

  
_Doubt thou the stars are fire—E_  
Sent 1:04 PM  


_Did you just…Is that Shakespeare?—A_

Sent 1:05 PM

  
_You have this wonderful device in your hand called a smartphone—E_  
_I suggest you use it—E_  
_A very fetching flight attendant has told me to put my phone away—E_  
_See you at home—E_  
Sent 1:06 PM  


_Eames…You can’t just—A_

_Don’t turn your phone off yet!—A_

Sent 1:06 PM

_I looked up the quote.—A_

_It is Shakespeare—A_

_Of course you know Shakespeare off the top of your head. Why am I surprised?—A_

_My flight takes off in half an hour—A_

_You won’t see this for hours—A_

_Why am I still texting you?—A_

_Enjoy your layover in Reykjavik—A_

Sent 1:15 PM

  


_Doubt thou the stars are fire—A_

_Doubt that the sun doth move—A_

_Doubt truth to be a liar—A_

Sent 1:45 PM

  
_But never doubt I love—E_  
Sent 11:50 PM

_Time zones are a bitch—E_  
Sent 11:53 PM  
_I’ve landed in London—E_  
_Calling a cab now—E_  
_I’ll see you tomorrow darling—E_  
Sent 4:15 AM  


_Of course you had to follow it up—A_

_You just had to let reality seep in to the moment didn’t you?—A_

_I’ve landed in Dublin—A_

Sent 6:00 AM

_I think I hate Paris—A_

Sent 11:00 AM

  
_You don’t hate Paris—E_  
_You hate the French—E_  
Sent 11:06 AM  


_My flight is delayed—A_

Sent 11:10 AM

  
_You’re meant to spend the night with Ari—E_  
Sent 11:11 AM  


_I was going to surprise you?—A_

Sent 11:12 AM

  
_Only you would phrase that as a question darling—E_  
_When am I to expect you?—E_  
Sent 11:15 AM  


_Six-ish—A_

Sent 11:35 AM

  


_I love you—A_

Sent 11:41 AM

  


_Eames?—A_

Sent 12:00 PM

  


_Oh for fuck’s sake, I’m calling you—A_

Sent 12:03 PM

Eames picked up on the fourth ring. He let Arthur shout at him a bit, smiling the whole time. He pulled up the contact information for a friend who still owed him a favor and sent it to Arthur. The tirade stopped as he heard Arthur’s phone vibrate. Message received, he told Arthur that he’d be seeing him a bit sooner than six if he would calmly leave the airport and find a bloke named Kevin outside. Three hours and a private jet later, Arthur knocked on Eames’ front door.

“Mr. Eames, I’m impressed.”

“Always with the condescension, darling.”


End file.
